[El Gato]

To be clear, i don’t mean burn the soy or corn oil itself, but rather a Diesel fuel made from them. People have burned used oil from McDonalds. Makes the exhaust smell like French Fries. :)

[Twinkie]

“Makes the exhaust smell like French Fries.:)”

YUMMY!

[rellimpank]

--I should have made it more clear that I meant from the ground up--

--as an aside to this, have a friend who sold equipment in Wisconsin for years. When calling on an ethanol plant, he commented that some of the product must be used in the distillation heating. Response was "hell no--this stuff is too expensive--we use natural gas"--

[El Gato]

Some of that increase in food prices is part of the general inflation, caused by all the government borrowing. But the rest is probably tied to the fuel-food coupling through the extra demand for corn and soybeans caused by the ethanol affair. To some extent that coupling has always been there. Since it takes fuel to grow the crops, and fuel to move it to market. But not as tight a coupling as we have now.

OTOH, knowing there was a pretty stable market, farmers have put more land into corn and soy beans, which are complementary crops. You can rotate between them, although it's a good idea to put in some alfalfa type crop into the rotation as well, along with some fallow time. My wife's grandfather did that, the sharecropper who farms the place now does it too. He's a very good steward of the land. He knows "Walt" would come back and haunt him if he wasn't. :)

Still, the government should have been subsidizing the alcohol by tax policy as they have.